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Special Event: The European Migration Crisis

Upcoming talk by Emily Arnold-Fernández, Founder and Executive Director, Asylum Access. 

Discussants:
James Cavallaro, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School 
Jenny S. Martinez, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School 

"Human Rights and Refugees in Europe"
Date: January 22, 2016 
Time: 12:00PM to 1:30PM 
Location: Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall 
RSVP by 5:00PM January 19, 2016. 

Emily Arnold-FernándezWorking in conjunction with the WSD HANDA Center for Human Rights and International Justice, The Europe Center is pleased to announce a talk by Emily Arnold-Fernández, Founder and Executive Director of Asylum Access. During her visit to Stanford, Ms. Arnold-Fernández will discuss the rights of refugees and obligations of states under international law more generally before focusing on how European Union law affects these rights and obligations. Discussants James Cavallaro and Jenny S. Martinez, both of whom are professors of law at Stanford Law School, will further explore how international law has influenced the ways in which Europe and the larger international community has addressed the latest refugee crisis.

Emily Arnold-Fernández is a lawyer who has advocated nationally and internationally for the human rights of women, children, and other vulnerable individuals. She first became involved in refugee rights in 2002, when she represented refugees in United Nations proceedings in Cairo, Egypt. Recognizing that refugees throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America were almost always unequipped to go into a legal proceeding in a foreign country, alone, and explain why they should not be deported, Ms. Arnold-Fernández founded Asylum Access in 2005 in order to advocate on behalf of refugees seeking to assert their rights. For her work with this underserved and vulnerable community, Ms. Arnold-Fernández has been honored by the Dalai Lama as one of 50 “Unsung Heroes of Compassion” from around the world (2009), Waldzell Institute’s Architects of the Future Award (2012), and Grinnell College Young Innovator for Social Justice Prize (2013). Ms. Arnold-Fernández holds a B.A. from Pomona College (1999) and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center (2004). We invite you to visit our website for additional information about this event.

 

Featured Faculty Research: Peter Koudijs

We would like to introduce you to some of The Europe Center's faculty affiliates. Our featured faculty member this month is Peter Koudijs, who is an Assistant Professor of Finance in the Graduate School of Business.

Peter KoudijsPeter earned his Ph.D. in Economics, Finance, and Management from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain in 2011 and joined the faculty at Stanford University that same year. In his research, Peter uses historical evidence to shed light on the functioning of financial markets, focusing specifically on asset prices in the short and long run and on the role of bankruptcy protection on risk taking and investment. His recent article in theJournal of Political Economy examines the effect of private information on asset prices. While it is widely accepted that private information affects asset prices, the unobservable nature of private information obscures the dynamics of this relationship. The theoretical literature on this topic suggests that actors engaging in insider trading will strategically spread out trades over time. Specifically, because trading behavior provides information about asset value through changes in price, spreading out trades controls the flow of value information to the market and increases the actor's profits. In a novel empirical test of this relationship, Peter examines prices of English securities traded in London and Amsterdam in the 18th century. During this time, twice-weekly boats delivered information about these English assets from London to Amsterdam. While news typically arrived in Amsterdam three days after departing London, inclement weather and poor infrastructure frequently slowed travel, resulting in delays of varying lengths. If actors with private information were indeed engaging in the theorized strategic trading behavior, asset prices in Amsterdam would correlate with those in London even in the absence of new information and this behavior would vary as a function of expected ship arrivals. This is exactly what Peter finds. His paper contributes to the literature on financial markets by using a unique historical context to provide evidence of the role of private information and strategic investor behavior in shaping asset prices. In related work, forthcoming in the Journal of Finance, Peter uses this same historical setting to examine the importance of public information and liquidity shocks on asset price discovery. We invite you to visit our website for additional information about this research.

Publication Details: Koudijs, Peter. 2015. “Those Who Know Most: Insider Trading in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam.” Journal of Political Economy 123(6):1356-1409.

 

Featured Graduate Student Research: Leonardo Barleta

We would like to introduce you to some of the students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured student this month is Leonardo Barleta (History). Leonardo is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Stanford University.

Leonardo BarletaLeonardo is a historian who is interested in the emergence and historical development of peripheral regions of empire. His current research uses the case of the Portuguese empire to examine the mechanisms that European empires developed to administer their colonies in the Early Modern period. The European colonial powers created vast imperial structures designed to administer distant parts of their empires. Yet the communication technology of the time resulted in both leaders in the imperial capital and administrators in far-flung territories making decisions in the absence of complete information. Scholars have sought to understand the decision-making process of authorities under these conditions of inconsistent communication and unreliable information, and some have argued that this led decision-makers to be indifferent to local knowledge. In research at Lisbon's Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, National Archive Torre do Tombo, and Biblioteca Nacional, partially supported by The Europe Center, Leonardo uncovered evidence to the contrary. His archival research suggests that local knowledge - transmitted to the imperial capital via letters from litigants seeking dispute settlements in distant parts of the empire or petitions to the king by mobile vassals - served as an important source of information for those administering faraway domains.

Leonardo is currently using the data retrieved from the archives to develop his dissertation prospectus, which examines the development of peripheral regions of the Portuguese empire. He expects to defend his prospectus before the end of the academic year and to return to the archives to continue collecting data for this project.

 

Upcoming Graduate Student Grant Competition: Accepting Applications March 28, 2016 - April 15, 2016

The Europe Center invites applications from graduate and professional students at Stanford University whose research or work focuses on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to prepare for dissertation research and to conduct research on approved dissertation projects. The Europe Center also supports early graduate students who wish to determine the feasibility of a dissertation topic or acquire training relevant for that topic. Additionally, funds are available for professional students whose interests focus on some aspect of European politics, economics, history, or culture; the latter may be used to support an internship or a research project. For more information please visit our website.

 

Call for Applications: The Europe Center Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe

Application Deadline: February 9, 2016

A key priority of The Europe Center is to provide Stanford’s undergraduate student community with opportunities to develop a deep understanding of contemporary European society and affairs. By promoting knowledge about the opportunities and challenges facing one of the world’s most economically and politically integrated regions, the Center strives to equip our future leaders with the tools necessary to tackle complex problems related to governance, geopolitics, and economic interdependence both in Europe and in the world more broadly.

In order to facilitate this goal, The Europe Center is sponsoring undergraduate internships to be completed in summer 2016. Sponsored internships are available with the following entities:

We invite applications from Stanford University undergraduate students interested in these exciting opportunities. For more information please visit our website.

 

Recap: Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Philip M. Breedlove, Visits Stanford

General Philip M. BreedloveEurope is facing a dynamic and evolving geopolitical situation, with conflicts on two fronts. To the east, Russia seeks to expand both its territory and its power; to the south, the Syrian civil war continues to generate refugee flows into Europe. In his November visit to Stanford, General Philip M. Breedlove, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, spoke about these threats and discussed the central role of NATO in buttressing European security. General Breedlove drew attention to the nexus of these two security threats, positing that Russian involvement in Syria is intended to promote the image of Russia as a world power and to foster in the region regimes supportive of Russia. While Russia argues that its intervention in Syria is intended to promote global peace by helping to end the Syrian conflict, General Breedlove suggests that the sincerity of this claim is undermined by Russian intransigence over Georgia and Ukraine. Ultimately, he argued that maintaining security in the contemporary geopolitical context requires a continued commitment to NATO and the Transatlantic security apparatus. Following his presentation, General Breedlove engaged in a lively question and answer session with the audience, fielding questions on topics such as the ability of NATO member states to meet their 2 percent military spending commitment, how to engage with Russia without playing into the narrative that the west is surrounding them, and the prospects for Afghanistan. To watch General Breedlove's talk and the following question and answer period in full, please visit our website.

 

Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor at Stanford University: Herlinde Pauer-Studer

Herlinde Pauer-StuderThe Europe Center is delighted to welcome Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, to Stanford University. Dr. Pauer-Studer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna and her research interests include ethics, political philosophy, and legal philosophy. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Salzburg. During her time at Stanford University, Dr. Pauer-Studer will be teaching in the Department of Philosophy and working on a book about the normative distortions in the National Socialist legal system, focusing on the period 1933-1939. Please join us in welcoming Dr. Pauer-Studer to The Europe Center and Stanford University.

 

The Europe Center Sponsored Events

January 22, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Emily Arnold-Fernández, Founder and Executive Director, Asylum Access 
"Human Rights and Refugees in Europe" 
Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall 
RSVP by 5:00PM January 19, 2016.
This event is co-sponsored by The Europe Center and the WSD HANDA Center for Human Rights and International Justice.

February 8, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Didac Queralt, Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG), Barcelona 
Workshop Title TBD 
Encina Hall West, Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge)
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

February 11, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
David Laitin, Department of Political Science 
Book Launch: Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies 
CISAC Central Conference Center, Encina Hall 
RSVP by 5:00PM February 8, 2016.

Save the Date: February 18-19, 2016 
8:00AM - 5:00PM 
Workshop: Heritage Bureaucracies: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives 
Stanford Archaeology Center 
This conference is co-sponsored by The Europe Center, Stanford Archaeology Center, Cantor Arts Center, Department of Anthropology, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford Humanities Center, The Europe Center, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and The Mediterranean Studies Forum.
Please visit our website for more information.

March 28, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Adam Tooze, Columbia University 
NATO Expansion and the Swap Lines: the Unspoken Geopolitics of the Financial Crisis in Europe, 2007-2013
Encina Hall East, Reuben Hills Conference Room 
RSVP by 5:00PM March 24, 2016.

April 25, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Torben Iversen, Harvard University 
Workshop Title TBD 
Encina Hall West, Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge) 
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Save the Date: April 28-29, 2016 
9:00AM - 5:00PM 
Conference: Networks of European Enlightenment 
Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center 
This conference is co-sponsored by The Europe Center, the French Cultural Workshop, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

May 9, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Monica Martinez-Bravo, Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros (CEMFI), Madrid 
Workshop Title TBD 
Encina Hall West, Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge) 
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

May 16, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Daniel Stegmueller, University of Mannheim 
Workshop Title TBD 
Encina Hall West, Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge) 
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

European Security Initiative Events

February 2, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Roger Cohen, New York Times 
Talk Title TBD
Location TBD 
RSVP by 5:00PM January 29, 2016.

 

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2008 witnessed a double shock to the post Cold War order. The North Atlantic financial system suffered a historic crisis, which could be managed only by unprecedented financial intervention by the US state. Weeks before Wall Street imploded, Russia invaded Georgia, a country which earlier in the year had been promised NATO membership. Too little remarked upon at the time, this paper will argue that this conjuncture revealed stark limits to the North Atlantic system of security and financial stability, which since 2013 have come back to haunt us in the on-going Ukrainian crisis. 
 

Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University.

Note: New Location

CISAC Central Conference Room

Adam Tooze Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History Speaker Columbia University
Seminars
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This conference aims to further our understanding of the institutional cultures, funding schemes and power structures underlying transnational institutions, with a particular focus on heritage bureaucracies. We bring together scholars working at the intersection of archaeology, anthropology, sociology and law to offer a broader understanding of the intricacies of multilateral institutions and global civic society in shaping contemporary heritage governance. Speakers will provide ethnographic perspectives on the study of international organizations, such as the UN and EU, in an effort to show the entanglement of political and technical decision-making.

A 2-day international conference organized by Claudia Liuzza and Gertjan Plets.

Speakers:

Brigitta Hauser-Shäublin (Institute of Ethnology, Göttingen University)
Ellen Hertz (Institute of Ethnology, University of Neuchâtel)
Miyako Inoue (Department of Anthropology, Stanford University)
Claudia Liuzza (Department of Anthropology, Stanford University)
Brigit Müller (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
Elisabeth Niklason (Department of Archeaology, Stockholm University)
Gertjan Plets (Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford University)
Cris Shore (Department of Anthropology, The University of Auckland)
Ana Vrdoljak (Department of Law, University of Technology, Sydney)

Co-sponsored by Stanford Archaeology Center, Cantor Arts Center, Department of Anthropology, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford Humanities Center, The Europe Center, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, The Mediterranean Studies Forum.

Contact: heritagebur@gmail.com

Heritage Bureaucracies Conference Flyer
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Stanford Archaeology Center (BLDG 500)
488 Escondido Mall
Stanford Universit

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Can a natural disaster shift long-standing party support for the long-term? Studies of political behavior indicate that, as elections approach, voters punish or credit governments based on their responses to severe weather phenomena. It may still be considered an open question, however, if poor crisis response could trigger more durable shifts in long-standing party support. I provide empirical evidence suggesting that it could. I exploit a crucial case for the study of change in party support, Storm Gudrun (Erwin), to examine long lasting punishment effects over crisis response. The estimated effect is of a magnitude that equals the largest block-transfer of voters in Swedish history and can be seen over three parliamentary elections (2006, 2010 and 2014).

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Lina M. Eriksson
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From Voltaire’s correspondence with Catherine the Great, to Adam Smith’s travels on the European continent, mediated and unmediated communication was the lifeline of the Enlightenment. Where historians once spoke of the Enlightenment in national terms (e.g., the “Scottish Enlightenment” vs. “German Enlightenment”), they are increasingly recognizing the ways in which the communication networks that spread across countries provided the infrastructure for thinking in a new, “European” fashion. What’s more, the recent influx of metadata from the correspondences of major Enlightenment figures now allows scholars to study these networks at both the micro and macro levels. We are therefore well poised to produce far clearer maps of how the Enlightenment spread out across Europe and beyond, to European colonies. And we can trace the return of knowledge from the periphery back to the center’s capitals.

 

This 2-day conference, convened by Dan Edelstein, will assemble some of the leading scholars who are using data-driven scholarship to study the information networks that made the Enlightenment possible, and contributed to create a new sense of European identity.

 

April 29, 10:00am – 5:30pm

9:30am-10:00am       Breakfast & Coffee

10:00am - 12:00pm   Correspondence & Communication
Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, “Experiencing the 'Communication Process' of the Enlightenment: Three Case Studies”
Charlotta Woolf, “Un ami des philosophes modernes": The Networks of Swedish Ambassador Gustav Philip Creutz in Paris, 1766-1783”
Andrew Kahn, “The Enlightenment Correspondence of Catherine the Great: the Digital Project”

12:00pm – 1:00pm     Lunch

1:00pm - 3:00pm       Science & Technology
Paola Bertucci, “Artisanal Networks: The République des lettres and The Société des arts”
Jessica Riskin, “Lamarckiana” 
Paula Findlen, “Imagining a Community:  The Scientific Networks of Laura Bassi, Emilie du Chatelet, and Maria Gaetana Agnesi” 

3:00pm-3:30pm         Coffee break

3:30pm - 5:30pm       Religious Networks
Thomas Wallnig, “Catholic Early Enlightenment in Central Europe? - Abbot Gottfried Bessel between Order, Church, Court and Booktrade”
Christopher Warren, “Quaker Networks and Quaker Enlightenment”
Claude Willan, “The English Enlightenment Network”

 

For further information, please visit the conference website.

 

Sponsored by The Europe Center, The Stanford Humanities Center, The French Culture Workshop, The France-Stanford Center, and The Division for Literature, Cultures, and Languages.

Stanford Humanities Center, Levinthal Hall

Conferences
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From Voltaire’s correspondence with Catherine the Great, to Adam Smith’s travels on the European continent, mediated and unmediated communication was the lifeline of the Enlightenment. Where historians once spoke of the Enlightenment in national terms (e.g., the “Scottish Enlightenment” vs. “German Enlightenment”), they are increasingly recognizing the ways in which the communication networks that spread across countries provided the infrastructure for thinking in a new, “European” fashion. What’s more, the recent influx of metadata from the correspondences of major Enlightenment figures now allows scholars to study these networks at both the micro and macro levels. We are therefore well poised to produce far clearer maps of how the Enlightenment spread out across Europe and beyond, to European colonies. And we can trace the return of knowledge from the periphery back to the center’s capitals.

 

This 2-day conference, convened by Dan Edelstein, will assemble some of the leading scholars who are using data-driven scholarship to study the information networks that made the Enlightenment possible, and contributed to create a new sense of European identity.

 

April 28, 1:00pm – 5:30pm

1:00pm - 3:00pm       Historical Network Theory
Ruth Ahnert & Sebastian Ahnert, “Quantitative Network Analysis and Early Modern Correspondence”
Dan Edelstein, “How to Study Networks Without ‘Edgy’ Data”
Nicole Coleman, “Fibra: A Graph-Drawing Tool for Social Network Analysis”

3:00pm - 3:30pm       Coffee break

3:30pm - 5:30pm       Paris, Capital of Enlightenment
Nicholas Cronk, “The invention of Voltaire's correspondence”
Maria Comsa, “Theatrical Networks in 18th-Century France”
Melanie Conroy & Chloe Edmondson, “French Salons in the Age of Enlightenment”

 

For further information, please visit the conference website.

 

Sponsored by The Europe Center, The Stanford Humanities Center, The French Culture Workshop, The France-Stanford Center, and The Division for Literature, Cultures, and Languages.


 

Stanford Humanities Center, Levinthal Hall

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As Christmas celebrations for 2015 wind down, Stanford historian and archaeologist Ian Morris discusses the global reach of different aspects of the Christmas holiday, and compares theories of the relative influence of "soft power" cultural exports and "hard power" military and economic intervention on world societies.

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Ian Morris
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NOTE: Event registration is full. Some seats may be available in case of no shows; please arrive early.

 

For the first time since it started moving toward "ever closer union" more than a half-century ago, Europe finds itself closer to unraveling than to greater integration. The euro, conceived to cement unity and hitch Germany forever to its European partners, has sown disunity by placing economies and cultures as diverse as the Greek and the German within the same currency. Britain is to hold a referendum this year or next on leaving the European Union. Its outcome is uncertain. At Europe's eastern borders, President Putin is doing what he can to undermine the European idea and create havoc in the no-man's lands between the Union and Russia. Ukraine has paid a preposterous price in blood and treasure for seeking a trade accord with Brussels, a perceived offense to Moscow. Refugees from a war the West has fanned through indecision, and from other conflict zones, converge on the continent; Germany alone took in 1.1 million in 2015. Parisians die in a hale of bullets. Brussels shuts down. Everywhere, instability and anxiety favor nationalist movements.

The miracle of a Europe whole and free is increasingly taken for granted. As miracles go, it's just so 20th-century. America, to a significant degree, has disengaged -- Europe is an old story by now. Is the greatest peace-generating mechanism of recent decades on the verge of coming apart?

 

Roger Cohen has worked for The New York Times for 25 years as a foreign correspondent, foreign editor, and now columnist. Prior to that he worked for The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. He is the author of four books. The latest, a family memoir entitled The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family, was published to wide acclaim by Alfred A. Knopf in January, 2015. He has taught at Harvard and Princeton and his work has been recognized with several awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from Britain’s Next Century Foundation and a prize from the Overseas Press Club of New York. Raised in South Africa and England, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, he is a naturalized American.

Roger Cohen Columnist Speaker The International New York Times
Seminars
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Monica Martinez-Bravo is an associate professor at CEMFI in Madrid, Spain. She received her Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 2010. Her research interests are in the fields of Political Economy and Economic Development.

 

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Encina Hall West, Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge)

Monica Martinez-Bravo Associate Professor Speaker CEMFI
Lectures
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States make war, and wars make states. The second clause of Tilly's dictum assumes that the fiscal effort that states exert to wage war persists over time. This paper investigates the effect of war on long-term fiscal capacity as a function of two types of war financing instruments: taxes and loans. Tax-waged wars are argued to exert lasting effects on state capacity, as new taxes require enhancements of the state apparatus as well as complementary fiscal innovations. Loan-waged wars may not contribute to long-term state capacity, as countries might default once the war is over, thus preempting any persistent fiscal effect. Importantly, the way war is waged might be endogenous. To cope with this possibility, I exploit unanticipated crashes in the nineteenth-century international capital markets, which temporarily banned warring states from borrowing regardless of their (un)observed characteristics. The analysis shows that countries that fought wars while the international credit markets were down have today higher fiscal capacity, measured by income tax ratios as well as the size of the tax administration. Altogether, the paper advances the conditions under which wars exert positive and lasting effects on state building.

 

Didac Queralt is a junior professor at the Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG) in Barcelona. He received his Ph.D. from the NYU Politics Department in September 2012.

His research lies at the intersection of comparative political economy and international relations, with a focus on the political economy of fiscal capacity building in Europe (East and West) and the Americas. Using formal methods, he investigates tax compliance in scenarios of low fiscal capacity, as well as the replacement of old forms of taxation (e.g. trade taxes) by modern extractive technologies (e.g. income taxation) that result from deliberate investment in the tax administration. He analyzes the theoretical predictions using contemporary data from developing economies in Latin America and Eastern Europe, as well as historical data for European powers in the pre-modern era.

In addition, he investigates the origins of direct taxation in the Western World, both with macro- and micro-data, as well as the electoral politics underlying the expansion of the fiscal state. Currently, he is involved in a quasi-experimental test of the legacy of pre-modern wars on state capacity, and an field experiment on tax progressivity in Colombia,

 

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Encina Hall West, Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge)

Didac Queralt Junior Professor Speaker Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG), Barcelona
Seminars
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